Category: Uncategorized

Chinquapin Publishers has released Record of a Soldier in the Late War: The Confederate memoir of John Wesley Bone, edited by Julianne Bone Mehegan and David Mehegan. The editors will discuss their research process and read from the book.

March 24, 1 p.m. at Suffolk University, Mildred F. Sawyer Library
73 Tremont St. 2nd floor, Poetry Center
John Wesley Bone was eighteen when he enlisted as a private with the North Carolina 30th Regiment. He was a common Confederate soldier who experienced almost every aspect of the War Between the States.
– He fought in battles at Malvern Hill, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and Cedar Creek.
– At the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Bone was struck by a bullet that pierced his chest and lodged in his backpack. After three days lying between the lines of fire, he was rescued and taken to Gordonsville Hospital, then furloughed home. He recovered and five months later rejoined his regiment.
– Bone was at Appomattox Court House when Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865.

This memoir is his story, written forty years after the surrender. The editors annotated the memoir and added material about John Wesley Bone’s life before and after the war. Illustrations and battlefield maps clarify the content.Record of a Soldier in the Late War: The Confederate Memoir of John Wesley Bone will be available for purchase.

www.confederatememoir.com

About the Editors
Julianne Bone Mehegan is the great-granddaughter of John Wesley Bone. She graduated from Suffolk University with a degree in English. After a career in education and marketing, she now focuses on her interests in historic preservation and the arts. David Mehegan is the former book editor and publishing reporter of the Boston Globe. He has an English degree from Suffolk University and a PhD in textual editing from Boston University. The Mehegans live in Hingham, Massachusetts.

The excerpt below was featured in the article, titled “Humanities Master’s Programs: Exploring What Makes Us Human,” from the Office of CAS Communications and was written by Michael Samuels.

Editorial Studies: Sharing What It Means to Be Human – With Annotations and Corrections

The Editorial Institute at BU straddles the divide between academia and the “real world.” As one of the “applied humanities,” editorial studies prepare graduate students to become creators, protectors, and advocates of art and culture, with far-reaching impact.

What do you do with a degree in editorial studies? Christopher Ricks, literary critic and scholar, authority on Victorian poetry and Bob Dylan lyrics, and, with Archie Burnett, co-director of BU’s Editorial Institute, starts off by telling his students a story. He found, in “a catalogue from an absolutely first-rate autograph house in New York, for a very stiff price, a letter which the catalogue claimed was the last letter that Alfred Tennyson wrote during his life.” Ricks, who has edited Tennyson’s poems, recognized the handwriting: it wasn’t the poet’s, but his son’s. Ricks traced the misattribution back to its source, and called the autograph house. “There was a long pause at the other end of the phone,” he recalls, “and they said, ‘Would you send us the evidence of this?’ I said, ‘Yes.’”

Every text, he explains, involves editorial decisions about which version is best, what additional information deserves a footnote or endnote, what is a mistake and what is a creative liberty (Ricks says, for example, that he prefers Emily Dickinson’s spelling in the line “It stop opon a Spot”). The ability to make those decisions is almost universally useful, he says: “We all, all the time, in pretty well every discipline, use editions.”

“Our degrees, whether the one-year MA or the PhD, are not professional degrees, they’re academic degrees. Nevertheless, several of our successful students move into the publishing world.” Others become editors – including the editor of the prominent magazine Poetry – and still others go into curatorship, the rare book trade, library science, journalism, cultural organization administration…

Perhaps the best indication of the value of Editorial Studies is where students come from. The poet Saskia Hamilton edited two books of the letters of Robert Lowell, with informal guidance from Ricks. “Having done that work on those two books I just realized that there was a lot more about editing that I wanted to study,” she says, and the Editorial Institute was “the best place in the world” to do so. As she completes her degree at BU, Hamilton is applying what she’s learned to the classes she herself teaches as an English professor at Barnard.

For others, Editorial Studies is appealing because of its applicability outside the university. “I wasn’t interested in literary theory,” recalls Casy Calver (GRS ’14).“What really attracted me to editorial studies was this idea that you’re presenting material for the reader that they wouldn’t otherwise have, and you’re not interpreting it.”

Last spring, Calver defended her dissertation, an edition of the questionnaire Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (she likens it to Live Aid, but with T.S. Eliot instead of Bono). Now, Calver is the managing editor of two Boston Medical Center journals, Alcohol, Other Drugs, and Health: Current Evidence, and Addiction Science & Clinical Practice. “It’s really more the passion and the discipline of editing that gets translated to what I do now,” she says. “The basics of editing are universal.”

In light of that, “BU is very lucky to have Editorial Studies, because so many literature programs are theory-based, interpretation-based,” Calver adds. “Many people who have a literature background are going to go into work as editors and literary editors and they’re not going to have that kind of training that we are lucky enough to have.”

Editorial studies are applicable and lead to jobs, but no less importantly, the subject is a vital part of the study of literature, something that makes us better humans, expanding our view of the world. “We need to be able to entertain beliefs which we don’t hold,” says Professor Ricks. “The only two ways in which we do it are with individuals we love and with works of art.” As long as art and the study of art remain vital, then, so too will editorial studies. And BU’s Editorial Institute will remain one of the best places to launch—or further—a career in the applied humanities.

Punctuation matters always, but it takes on a new force and significance in early twentieth-century verse. Ezra Pound’s devotion to Hardy may be understood in these terms, especially if we look upon the spaces between words as a species of punctuation, as in the first printing (Poetry, April 1913) of Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro':

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough .

The multiple tab spaces that can be inserted between words, and between words and punctuation marks, can be indicated only by typewriter. The typewriter enables the poet to remove from the printing house what we can call ‘spatial authority’. Subsequent developments of free verse and the eccentricities of its lay-out depend on this technology, at least until the coming of the word-processor, whose control over space is much weaker than that of a typewriter. Among the last of the ‘typewriter’ poets is Robert Duncan who made of New Directions demands unprecedented in the history of printed verse.

Charles Lock has been Professor of English Literature at the University of Copenhagen since 1996. A Senior Scholar of Keble College, he received his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1982 for a dissertation on John Cowper Powys. In 1979 he was awarded the Laurence Binyon Prize (a University Prize) in the History of Art. He taught for two years at the University of Karlstad, in Sweden, and from 1983 was at the University of Toronto where he was appointed to Full Professor in 1993; he was also adjunct professor at Toronto in Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies, Religious Studies, and Medieval Studies.

Congratulations to current Editorial Institute PhD student, Nicole Depolo, who was elected to the Board of Directors of the Norman Mailer Society in 2014. She was also acknowledged as a contributor to TASCHEN’s 2014 edition of Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” and J. Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life, which was named Biography of the Year by The Times.

Editorial Institute PhD candidate, Stetson Robinson attended the The Charles S. Peirce International Centennial Congress, July 16-19 at UMass Lowell. Stetson’s dissertation work incorporates digitizing Pierce’s manuscripts via STEP (Scholarly Text-Editing Platform) in conjunction with the efforts of the Pierce Edition Project at Indiana University. As a result, Stetson was invited to present his dissertation in a workshop setting at Harvard University to a group of 20 leading Pierce Scholars.

Jeffrey Gutierrez, a current PhD student at the Editorial Institute has been awarded a scholarship from the Southern California Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America to attend course at the California Rare Book School.

He will attend Daniel Lewis’ seminar on archives this August at the California Rare Book School, UCLA.

Christopher Ohge, an Editorial Institute alumni, recently had A Digital Edition of Christopher Pearse Cranch’s ‘Journal. 1839.’ published in the Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing.

Christopher received his PhD in Editorial Studies at the Institute in 2012 and this publication is an electronic edition of a travel journal written in 1839 by the transcendentalist Christopher Cranch (which includes some draft caricatures of Ralph Waldo Emerson). The publication grew out of a project he started during his time at the Editorial Institute.

Editorial Institute PhD student Mary Erica Zimmer will be returning to the Folger Shakespeare Library on 15-16 May 2014 through ongoing NEH support for the Folger’s “Early Modern Digital Agendas” 2013 Summer Institute. Her early modern digital project, “Exploring the Bookshops of Paul’s Cross Churchyard,” will be presented as part of a roundtable at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference’s 2014 meeting in New Orleans, LA.

Cassandra Nelson, an Editorial Institute alumna and current PhD candidate at Harvard University, has been selected as an NEH Summer Scholar to attend one of thirty seminars and institutes supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nelson will participate in an institute entitled, “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor.” The four-week program will be held in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Georgia College & State University, co-directed by Professor Marshall Bruce Gentry of Georgia College & State University and by Professor Robert Donahoo of Sam Houston State University. Summer Scholars will attend ten lectures, participate in seminars conducted by leading O’Connor scholars including Gary Ciuba, Christina Bieber Lake, and Brad Gooch; and spend a week working with materials available only through the Georgia College library.

O’Connor is one of the writers considered in Nelson’s dissertation, which examines the role of religion and screen media in postwar American fiction. An essay adapted from her first dissertation chapter, about O’Connor’s ambivalent attitude toward film and television, received the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers’ Meringoff Nonfiction Award in 2012 and was published in Literary Imagination earlier this year.

Cassandra Nelson received her MA at the Editorial Institute in 2007 and will graduate from Harvard University this May.

Congratulations to Erica Zimmer, PhD Candidate in the Editorial Institute, for having presented at the University of Maine’s recent Digital Humanities Week, Surfacing: THATCAMP Maine 2013. her project presentation was entitled “Affordances of the Digital: Mapping, Modeling Texts, and Early Modern Methodologies.”